‘Mamie Djihad’ and ‘the white widow’: constructing French and British national identities in terrorist times of crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the media representation of two women who left the west for Islamic State (IS) in the mid-2010s: from France, Christine Rivière, nicknamed “Mamie Djihad” (Granny Jihad); and from Britain, Sally Jones, known as “The White Widow”. Both were white, middle-aged mothers, born and raised in their respective countries, who converted late in life and left behind established lives and (adult) children to join IS. While much has been written on the migration of western women to IS territory, scholarship has focused on younger women and girls who have been represented as groomed and vulnerable to IS propaganda. These two “unlikely jihadists” profoundly unsettled commonsense ideas about who was vulnerable to radicalisation, and, more troublingly, their defections could potentially be read as statements on the desirability of life in the west vis-à-vis IS’s model. Using Critical Discourse Analysis of leading French and British news media, the article demonstrates how journalists represented both women as always-already outside their respective nations through two key narratives: a gendered discourse of abject motherhood and an intersectional discourse that constructed them as abject inside Others. These narratives worked to suture the ideological rupture caused by these women, who were at first glance typically French/British, by demonstrating that they had actually always been on the margins of the national community and had always been dangerous to the nation.